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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28675254">The Star To Every Wand'ring Bark</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics'>inexplicifics</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Families of Choice, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:47:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,263</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28675254</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Vesemir can remember when the star was as large as a chandelier. It's smaller now - much smaller.</p><p>And then, impossibly, it starts to grow.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eskel &amp; Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia &amp; Lambert &amp; Vesemir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>703</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge #013</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Star To Every Wand'ring Bark</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Vesemir can remember when the star was as large as a chandelier, hanging from the beams above the great dining hall and scintillating with every stray beam of candlelight or weak winter sunlight. It had more colors than the rainbow, back then, and every year after the Trials were over Vesemir and Rennes and old Barmin would sit at the head table and watch as the new spikes grew into place.</p><p>Every year, a few fell off, to shatter on the stone floor; the pieces melted like ice, though Vesemir’s never known what they’re actually made of, and no matter how fast anyone scrambled to try to gather them up, there was never anything left on the stone but a little wet patch as red as blood. But there was always something reassuring about being able to look at the whole glittering assemblage of multi-hued spikes, and know that though a brother had been lost, still, the School went on.</p><p>And then the pogrom came.</p><p>Vesemir woke after the pogrom, weak with bloodloss still, and went staggering out into the great hall to see that the great star was half the size it had been, and beneath it the stone was <em>stained</em>, stained as though the heart’s blood of every fallen child and brother had been painted there.</p><p>Vesemir doesn’t like to think about that day, about falling to his knees below the star and weeping until he had no more tears to shed, about rising to find that he was the eldest of them - the eldest left. The one all the survivors, trailing in from the Path to stare in horror at the devastation, looked to as their leader.</p><p>He doesn’t like to think about how the star kept shrinking, either. They’ve always lost a few brothers every year, but a few out of sixty or seventy, when new brothers were growing up to claim their medallions - the star never really <em>shrank</em>. Now it does. Now it gets smaller and smaller, and there are no new spikes growing to replace the fallen.</p><p>After the tournament - after the <em>Cats</em> - when Vesemir makes it back to Kaer Morhen, the pitiful handful of his School around him, the star is so small he almost can’t find it. Geralt and Eskel help him find a ladder long enough to reach it, and Vesemir brings it down from the great hall and hangs it in his room instead, over a little table with a soft cloth padding it, in the hopes that maybe any fallen spikes will fail to melt. It’s a fool’s hope, and he knows it from the start, but he doesn’t take the cloth away, even as the years roll on and the white cloth is stained a deep and dreadful red, as spike after spike falls away.</p><p>Now, every morning when he wakes and every evening before he falls asleep, Vesemir looks at the star, counting its points: one, two, three, four. The last four Wolves in all the world. He can’t be sure which is which, but he thinks the clear one is Geralt, the dark one beside it probably Eskel, the pale red almost the same shade as Lambert’s hair for the youngest Wolf.</p><p>For years, there are four spikes, and Vesemir counts them morning and evening, and prays to gods he doesn’t think are listening that he will not live to see the other three spikes fall and stain the cloth a deeper red.</p><p>And then, one morning, he wakes and counts the spikes - and stops.</p><p>There are five.</p><p>
  <em>Five?</em>
</p><p>He doesn’t quite dare touch the new spike. It is a clear and lovely blue, and has grown beside Geralt’s like it was always meant to be there.</p><p>Vesemir has a great many questions, but there are no answers forthcoming, not that winter at least. Geralt arrives alone, as he always does, and Eskel and Lambert come tramping up the Trail in their turns, and the last Wolves spend the winter together, as they always do. No one mentions an impossible fifth Wolf, and Vesemir doesn’t dare ask.</p><p>He keeps not asking, too, but it gets harder. He goes to bed on Belletyn one year and finds a <em>sixth</em> spike, a beautiful gleaming green, has grown into place. A few years after that, a seventh joins them, a deep and lovely purple shade. Still no one mentions any new Wolves - not that there <em>could</em> be any new Wolves, the mutagen recipes are gone and the mages are gone and the trainees are skeletons in the dry moat - and Vesemir eyes the star every morning and wonders what the hell is going on.</p><p>The next year there is another spike, this one deep green like moss on a boulder, right beside the pale red of Lambert’s, and Vesemir puzzles over it all that long summer, it and its inexplicable fellows. He knows the spikes didn’t grow until after the trainees passed their Medallion Trials, until they were part of the Wolf School in truth, and there have been no Trials for decades now, so who can these be?</p><p>It’s three more winters before he figures it out, the year Eskel comes home with a Griffin Witcher trailing after him. Coën, last of his School; he is a polite and gentlemanly guest, and Vesemir makes him welcome, as do Geralt and Lambert, once they get over their immediate instinct to growl. By the end of the winter, they’ve all grown so fond of Coën that Vesemir extends an invitation for the Griffin to winter with them any year he cares to - to consider Kaer Morhen his home, a poor replacement for Kaer Seren but a sanctuary all the same.</p><p>And that night, when Vesemir stumbles to bed after far too much celebratory White Gull, because of course they had to drink to welcome their cousin home properly, there is a ninth spike on the star. It is the exact shade of yellowish green as Coën’s eyes.</p><p>Vesemir touches it with a single finger, wondering. Coën is their kinsman, made welcome into the little pack which is all that is left of the Wolf School, and here is a spike grown onto the star.</p><p>Oh.</p><p>They aren’t new witchers, these spikes; they are instead those who are dear, as dear as kinsmen, to the few remaining Wolves.</p><p>The next morning, Geralt and Eskel and Lambert and Coën wake to find Vesemir sitting on the hearth, the star cradled in his lap, half-wrapped in the stained-red cloth. Frowning and hungover, his pups gather, and it’s Eskel who says, softly, “I thought there were only four left.”</p><p>Geralt reaches out to touch the star with one careful finger, as gently as though it were a new-born foal, though as far as Vesemir knows, it cannot be broken by anything but magic.</p><p>“There were,” Vesemir says. “But this one grew last night, for Coën our cousin, claimed and made welcome.”</p><p>Coën’s yellow-green eyes go very wide.</p><p>“I do not know which of you have claimed kin, out in the world,” Vesemir tells his pups solemnly. “But next winter, bring them home.”</p><p>*</p><p>The next winter, there are nine people in Kaer Morhen: four Wolves, a Griffin, and a Cat; a bard, a princess, and a sorceress. An odd assortment indeed, but Vesemir regards his motley family happily, and thinks that though there will be no more Wolf witchers, it is good to know that they have found kin, as dear as ever their fallen brothers were.</p><p>Someday, perhaps, there will be yet more spikes upon the star.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Written for the Witcher Flash Fic Challenge.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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